Architects, in Theory

By Arthur Lubow

Published: February 16, 2003

In preparation for their retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, along with a small team from their architecture office, gleefully assembled on a chilly January morning at the closed-for-reconstruction Museum of Modern Art building in Midtown Manhattan. Without telling the Whitney what they were up to, they had obtained permission from friends at the Modern to remove a MOMA wall fragment to install in their show. A work by Marcel Duchamp once hung in exactly this spot. The former white-walled museum gallery was now a command station for the MOMA demolition crew.

Originally, Diller and Scofidio planned to excise a number of ''auratic'' walls -- backdrops on which the aura of masterpieces might be said to have rubbed off. Then the qualms set in. They were daunted by the gritty task of sawing through Sheetrock, plywood and studs. In the realm of theory, they faced an even more worrisome roadblock. ''When we started putting together the walls, we realized we were recurating the collection,'' Diller says. By taking some walls and rejecting others, they would be performing a curator's function: deciding which works are aesthetically or historically important. That was not what they wanted to get at here.

With a single wall, they could underline how anything acquires an ''auratic power'' simply by being hung on the wall of a museum. So one wall it was, and with that settled, there was little question which wall it should be. To Diller and Scofidio, Duchamp is a pioneer, witty and profound. Other architects might daydream of designing a Brunelleschi dome or a Schinkel facade, but the ultimate project for Diller and Scofidio would be a structure that called into question the nature of architecture, the way Duchamp's ''Fountain,'' a porcelain urinal that the artist named, turned upside down and signed, questioned the nature of art. If you're interested in games of perception, the power of wordplay and the discovery of unexpected beauty in the prosaic, Duchamp is your man.

For this foray, Diller and Scofidio, who are married, were both wearing gray ribbed sweaters and black trousers, yet they projected very different auras. With short dark hair and an engaging, toothy grin, Diller, 48, displays the mischievous mien of a perennial grad student. Her voice, which has the accentlessness of someone who learned English in another galaxy, ripples with enthusiasm and nervous energy. By contrast, Scofidio, 67, has the handsome, graven face of an Olmec idol. Even though his cropped hair and soul patch have turned steel gray, he looks far younger than his age. He speaks less often than Diller, and when he does, it is in a low voice, with a gurgle suggesting that he wants to swallow each word before it emerges. His manner is soothing and earnest -- the bass clef to her treble. ''I'm the one that whips everybody in the studio,'' Diller said. ''Ric is on his own schedule, in his own space. Sometimes he drives me nuts. I think he should be working faster and harder. But I'm neurotic, and he's not.''

Like scrub nurses in surgery, the team was starting to prep the patient -- in this case, the wall. ''We're not really sure of what is behind this wall,'' Diller said to me. ''We don't really have a Plan B. We have a Plan A and a Plan A-prime.''

''The first plan is to remove the plywood and the studs,'' Scofidio continued. ''But it may be that the electrical conduits run through the studs and we can't remove the whole wall. So then we go to Plan B, in which we just remove the Sheetrock from the plywood, and it pops free.''

''We have to inscribe the wall very carefully without making any marks on it,'' Diller said, eyeing the two young staff members who were outlining with a pencil the area to be cut. ''As absurd as it is, we still want to protect the authenticity of that wall.''

The assistants finished taping protective paper over the Sheetrock section, leaving a safe margin on all sides. Another man then screwed a wooden palette to the wall.

''I just had this strange feeling that we're taking this wall into captivity and moving it to another site,'' Diller said with a giggle.

Diller and Scofidio are receiving a major museum retrospective, opening March 1, at the moment they are preparing to break ground on their first major building, the $37 million Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Their influence, however, overshadows their list of completed commissions. ''In experimental architecture and design, they are the only ones who made as the core of their work the question 'What do we mean by architecture?''' says Aaron Betsky, director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute and curator of the Whitney show along with K. Michael Hays, the museum's adjunct curator of architecture. Architects starting out, from Le Corbusier to Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas and Daniel Libeskind, often rely on journalism and essays to make their theoretical points. Unusually, Diller and Scofidio have always built -- by their own definition, on whatever scale they could. Back in 1981, they placed 2,500 orange cones in Columbus Circle for 24 hours to illustrate traffic patterns. Five years later, they constructed a span inside the anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge with a gap that an intrepid performer vaulted over. Sometimes they collaborated with choreographers and theater directors; at other times they composed video pieces and museum exhibitions. ''We always thought of it as an architectural practice,'' Scofidio says. ''We started at a time of recession, but we didn't want to do paper architecture.''